The AYCL Blog

Are You Our Next Front-end Web Intern? We’ll be looking for an amazing Front-end Web Developer Intern for a paid, 6-month internship. It starts in early April in our offices just north of Boston.

Fast Forward Six Months… We’d like to thank you for doing a fantastic job as our spring / summer Front-end Web Developer Intern. You’ve excelled at maintaining, editing, and documenting our stable of web properties. You spent much of your time creating all of our outbound HTML emails, and managed those campaigns through MailChimp. You supported those campaigns with social media managed through Sprout and added related posts to Medium.

Your site development skills are top-notch, as you worked closely with our web team to improve our online products. You worked your magical HTML5, and CSS3 skills to get our next version closer to what our users want. You explored WordPress and other builder tools.

To top it off, you’ve even helped us improve the documentation for our Git-based development process to make life easier for future interns and mined useful data from multiple databases for our Director of Marketing.

We need to see evidence that you can hand code HTML & CSS (some examples). A personal portfolio is best. Public GitHub repos are good.

Extra credit: A short list of the things you’d like to learn in your 6 months with us.

While we’re less concerned with your skills and qualifications, we won’t compromise on your ability to deliver team results. We’ll be back to you in 48 hours if you can follow these simple directions and have what it takes to achieve something special.

You will work in our North Andover offices. (Sorry, we do not hire remote interns, or those not already in the United States.) We’ll provide all the equipment you need, including Apple hardware and Mac software to bring out the best in your talents and skills.

We’d like this internship to begin in early April, with the ideal individual working up to 40 hours per week, but offer flexibility to the right candidate. This temporary position is not eligible for full-time benefits, such as health insurance.

In three short webinars, Whitney Quesenbery, cofounder of the Center for Civic Design and an expert in accessible UX, shares the secrets behind creating truly accessible products. Through insights, examples, and experiences, she illustrates the issues and explains how to build a design process that includes accessibility.

We’re all familiar with bad workshops: hours—or days—of unstructured discussion that ends with no clear outcome. Good workshops, however, are the perfect way to kick off a project, conduct discovery, and collaborate with coworkers. In this seminar recording of Winning UX Workshops, Austin Govella gives us a three-part surefire formula for effective, productive, and winning workshops: frame, facilitate, and finish.

Graphics are such an important part of any design, but too often they don’t seem to have any real purpose and are just put there to look pretty and take up space. So how do you create graphics that are actually useful to your users? Here are some tips from Patrick Hofmann.

Before you even start to draw, have a plan. Know what it is you are trying to accomplish. This not only helps you create a better graphic, it saves you time.

Wren Lanier shows you in this recording, how uncovering and understanding problems creates better design, why focusing on solutions can lead to missed opportunities, and why problem discovery is a valuable process that can lead to big payoffs.

Animation is a great tool to use to direct the user’s attention toward something specific in the interface. Val Head shares examples of how companies like Fitbit animate design elements to draw the user’s attention toward specific data.

Other successful uses of animation include the way interfaces mimic natural gestures, like a form that shakes when the user tries to submit it before it is completed. The action is similar to the way we shake our heads non-verbally when something is incorrect.

Quality animation can guide users and help them see a preview of an action they want to make. For example, the way drag and drop animations will show how a layout will rearrange when you move something. Val explains that these interactions are so common we forget how complicated they are to create.

In Empowerment in an Era of Self-Validating Facts, brand and content strategist Margot Bloomstein digs into the challenges of cultural predisposition. With some of the biggest brands, she’s uncovering new connections in how we design for empowerment—and they’ll change the way you support, guide, and engage your users.

Watch this seminar to discover how to design for empowerment, consider timing, and embrace opposing perspectives in your content all so you can help your audience embrace the courage of their convictions, on your behalf.

Explore the problems caused when internal truths trump external data.

Meet your audience where they are with your unique voice.

Gain your audience’s trust by delivering the right volume and types of content.

Reflect and rebuild trust by empowering your audience with vulnerability.

Designers have a lot of tools available to them to achieve that standard. They also have partners in their efforts: the devices readers use and the readers themselves. By understanding how readers view words, how devices transmit them, and how the brain processes them, designers are better able to adapt to and adjust for optimal readability and engagement. You’ll understand:

The way we meet for group workshops, project check-ins, brainstorms, and all other forms of information sharing and gathering, can be comically ineffective. By designing better ways for groups to meet, we can address some of the classic challenges that undermine group gatherings, such as:

People talking too much, or holding back

People staying in their comfort zone by keeping comments at a surface level

False consensus: people going along to get along

Debate mode, when conversations have winners and losers

Marc Rettig explores patterns of participation, dialogue theory, and the elements of good gatherings in his virtual seminar.

Service Design is about the design of services, from end-to-end communication materials, paper forms, call center scripts, to back and front-office software, and more. It’s a lot more complicated and bigger than a deliverable.

In this seminar, Chris details the challenges he and his team faced when trying to overhaul the system to book prison visits in the United Kingdom. It was a project fraught with complexity and not as easy to solve as getting people to agree on the research, or the problem.

Hear a real world application of service design principles that improved a public service

Learn how process and user-centered practices focused a team to find the right solution across a web of connected dependencies

Find out how a big legacy system challenge was solved by a low-tech solution

Explore creative ways to apply service design practices to big problems within a system